What happens if the Supreme Court strikes down 'Obamacare'? - Page 3

kokonut · 03-25-2012, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

I never said life was easy. In fact I happen to think the opposite. Life is real damn hard. But that's no excuse for people to roll over and cry "help me". I can guarantee you when I was standing on a roof in 100 degree heat trying not to throw up I never thought "this is easy". I did however think "I can do this" and that thought made all of the difference.

A can-do attitude, that's the spirit!

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 04:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

weak sauce. that's the only excuse you can come up with? Obamacare = gimme gimme gimme? I don't exactly see how. care to explain?

the whole point of Obamacare is to get you well soon so you can start working again asap. no economic loss. no big debt. no family crisis.

there would be no spirit left if you have to slave away for years just to pay off medical expense.

Yup, Obamacare isn't free money and people will still have pay for insurance thorough exchanges, not very expensive as direct private insurance.

Medicaid is limited to poor people only.

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 04:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kokonut

A can-do attitude, that's the spirit!

No doubt about you want me to die from accident or not get a medical help.

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 04:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

I'd like to see if you still have that optimism if you did actually faint and got sent to hospital in ambulance... and then you came home with over $5,000 just for simple diagnosis of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Yike, it can be avoided by drink a lot of water and frequent break.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

I'd like to see if you still have that optimism if you did actually faint and got sent to hospital in ambulance... and then you came home with over $5,000 medical bill just for simple diagnosis of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Had to go to the Dr more than once. Still remained optimistic.

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 04:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Had to go to the Dr more than once. Still remained optimistic.

I wish I can believe that

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 04:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

weak sauce. that's the only excuse you can come up with? Obamacare = gimme gimme gimme? I don't exactly see how. care to explain?

the whole point of Obamacare is to get you well soon so you can start working again asap. no economic loss. no big debt. no family crisis.

there would be no spirit left if you have to slave away for years just to pay off medical expense.

The whole point of Obamacare is a transfer of wealth.

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

The whole point of Obamacare is a transfer of wealth.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 04:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

I wish I can believe that

*shrug* That's your choice. Injuries happen all the time. Comes with the job

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 04:30 PM

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/...109128,00.html

Quote:

Two years ago, Barack Obama signed into law the most comprehensive reform of American health care since Medicare. Most of its provisions haven't been implemented yet. But the debate about it rages on at every level. Twenty-six states have filed legal challenges to it. And this month the Supreme Court will hear arguments about its constitutionality.

The centerpiece of the case against Obamacare is the requirement that everyone buy some kind of health insurance or face stiff penalties--the so-called individual mandate. It is a way of moving toward universal coverage without a government-run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private health care system, made precisely the same choice nearly 20 years ago: Switzerland. The lessons from Switzerland and other countries can't resolve the constitutional issues, but they suggest the inevitability of some version of Obamacare.

Switzerland is not your typical European welfare-state society. It is extremely business-friendly and has always gone its own way, shunning the euro and charting its own course on health care. The country ranks higher than the U.S. on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom.

Twenty years ago, Switzerland had a system very similar to America's--private insurers, private providers--with very similar problems. People didn't buy insurance but ended up in emergency rooms, insurers screened out people with pre-existing conditions, and costs were rising fast. The country came to the conclusion that to make health care work, everyone had to buy insurance. So the Swiss passed an individual mandate and reformed their system along lines very similar to Obamacare. The reform law passed by referendum, narrowly. The result two decades later: quality of care remains very high, everyone has access, and costs have moderated. Switzerland spends 11% of its GDP on health care, compared with 17% in the U.S. Its 8 million people have health care that is not tied to their employers, they can choose among many plans, and they can switch plans every year. Overall satisfaction with the system is high.

When Taiwan--another country with a strong free-market economy--decided to create a new health care system in the mid-1990s, it studied every existing model. It too chose a model of universal access and universal insurance but decided against having several private insurers, as Switzerland and the U.S. do. Instead it created a single insurer, basically a version of Medicare. The result: universal access and high-quality care at stunningly low costs. Taiwan spends only 7% of its GDP on health care.

The most striking aspect of America's medical system remains how much of an outlier it is in the advanced industrial world. No other nation spends more than 12% of its total economy on health care. We do worse than most other countries on almost every measure of health outcomes: healthy-life expectancy, infant mortality and--crucially--patient satisfaction. Put simply, we have the most expensive, least efficient system of any rich country on the planet. Costs remain high on every level. Recently, the International Federation of Health Plans released a report comparing the prices in various countries of 23 medical services, from a routine checkup to an MRI to a dose of Lipitor. The U.S. had the highest costs in 22 of the 23 cases. An MRI costs $1,080 here; it costs $281 in France.

In 1963, Nobel Prize--winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote an academic paper explaining why markets don't work well in health care. He argued that unlike with most goods and services, people don't know when they will need health care. And when they do need it--say, in the case of heart failure--the cost is often prohibitive. That means you need some kind of insurance or government-run system.

Now, we could decide as a society that it is O.K. for people who suddenly need health care to get it only if they can pay for it. The market would work just as it works for BMWs: anyone who can afford one can buy one. That would mean that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to pay for a triple bypass or a hip replacement when they needed it. But every rich country in the world--and many not-so-rich ones--has decided that its people should have access to basic health care. Given that value, a pure free-market model simply cannot work.

The Swiss and Taiwanese found that if you're going to have an insurance model, you need a general one in which everyone is covered. Otherwise, healthy people don't buy insurance and sick ones get gamed out of it. Catastrophic insurance--covering trauma and serious illnesses--isn't a solution, because it's chronically ill patients, just 5% of the total, who account for 50% of American health care costs. That's why the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, came up with the idea of an individual mandate in the 1980s, proposing that people buy health insurance in exactly the same way that people are required to buy car insurance. That's why Mitt Romney chose this model as a market-friendly system for Massachusetts when he was governor. And that's why Newt Gingrich praised the Massachusetts model as the most important step forward in health care in years. They have all changed their minds, but that is about politics, not economics.

The Obama health care plan is not perfect by any measure. It maintains the connection between employment and health care, which is massively inefficient and a huge burden on American business. While companies often talk about the need to reduce regulations to be competitive globally--which is true and important--they rarely talk about their single biggest handicap against global competitors. American companies have to pay tens of billions of dollars to provide health care for their employees and former employees, while their German, Canadian, Japanese and British counterparts pay next to nothing in health care costs in comparison.

The Obama bill expands access to 30 million Americans. That's good economics and also the right thing to do. But it does little in the way of controlling costs. Medicare's costs have stopped rising as fast as in the past. But for broader costs to decline, there is no alternative to having some kind of board that decides what is covered by insurance and what is not--as exists in every other advanced country. This has been demagogued as creating "death panels" when it is really the only sensible way to make the system work.

When listening to the debate about American health care, I find that many of the most fervent critics of government involvement argue almost entirely from abstract theoretical propositions about free markets. One can and should reason from principles. But one must also reason from reality, from facts on the ground. And the fact is that about 20 foreign countries provide health care for their citizens in some way or other. All of them--including free-market havens like Switzerland and Taiwan--have found that they need to use an insurance or government-sponsored model. All of them provide universal health care at much, much lower costs than we do and with better results.

Maybe there's a theoretical pure free-market model out there that would work. But in the world we know and live in, the task is not to abolish our system for a utopia that has never actually existed anywhere but rather to accept the messy, mixed-up reality that we have and try to improve it to allow people to have access to decent health care at an affordable price--something every other rich country in the world already does.

even Newt Gingrich supported it. why not you?

kokonut · 03-25-2012, 04:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Had to go to the Dr more than once. Still remained optimistic.

Yeah, knowing that it wasn't any thing worse like a brain tumor or somethin'.

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

*shrug* That's your choice. Injuries happen all the time. Comes with the job

exactly why we will help out so that you can get back to work and start contributing back to society.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 04:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

exactly why we will help out so that you can get back to work and start contributing back to society.

Most of "we" doesn't want to do that.

And I didn't need nor want "help"

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 05:17 PM

Oh, there are mindless and hopeless Americans, especially txgolfer is one of them, however nothing is new.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Foxrac

Oh, there are mindless and hopeless Americans, especially txgolfer is one of them, however nothing is new.

Wow....personal attacks!

kokonut · 03-25-2012, 05:23 PM

Geez...

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 05:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Wow....personal attacks!

Nothing is personal, you don't care, that why.

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 05:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Most of "we" doesn't want to do that.

And I didn't need nor want "help"

who is exactly "most of we"?

I'm noticing that ya'all seems to have a habit of saying "most.... millions.... many...." without any basis to back that up.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 05:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

who is exactly "most of we"?

I'm noticing that ya'all seems to have a habit of saying "most.... millions.... many...." without any basis to back that up.

"Most of we" would be a portion of "we"

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 05:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

"Most of we" would be a portion of "we"

I'm not one of your "we".

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 05:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Foxrac

I'm not one of your "we".

Ok.....where did I say you were?

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 05:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Ok.....where did I say you were?

You said as part of we.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 05:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Foxrac

You said as part of we.

Wut?

rockin'robin · 03-25-2012, 06:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

Wut?

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 07:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TXgolfer

"Most of we" would be a portion of "we"

ah yes. one of those silly tactics - resorting to quibbling when one lacks a sound argument to debate with Post #70.

"free money to all". "socialism!" wonderful argument!

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 07:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

ah yes. one of those silly tactics - resorting to quibbling when one lacks a sound argument to debate with Post #70.

"free money to all". "socialism!" wonderful argument!

No quibbling on this end bro. You must have misunderstood.

**Jiro** · 03-25-2012, 07:56 PM

so any comment about Post #70 especially the part where most modern, wealthy countries have system similar to Obamacare?

**Foxrac** · 03-25-2012, 07:58 PM

Yo txgolfer, do you want ALL government assistance to be abolished?

rolling7 · 03-25-2012, 08:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

meaning.... you either exaggerated it or lied.

Seeing as it is that you have not one bit of a sense of humor, I'll get serious with you. "Many, many" does not have a definite number but, just like the National Debt Clock, it keeps going up. At least under Obama it will.

**TXgolfer** · 03-25-2012, 08:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jiro

so any comment about Post #70 especially the part where most modern, wealthy countries have system similar to Obamacare?

Sure, the U.S. is the U.S. ....... Not "most modern wealthy countries"

03-25-2012, 05:17 PM	#74 (permalink)
Foxrac Need Stormtroopers? Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Zaphias Posts: 32,472	Oh, there are mindless and hopeless Americans, especially txgolfer is one of them, however nothing is new. __________________ In Moto We Trust

03-25-2012, 05:23 PM	#76 (permalink)
kokonut Registered User Join Date: Jul 2006 Posts: 15,348	Geez... __________________ Before AD. After AD. "Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." -Thurgood Marshall, former Supreme Court Justice "... turns out they are telling the truth."

03-25-2012, 07:56 PM	#87 (permalink)
Jiro Aparecium Deletrius Legil Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: The Soprano State Posts: 60,502	so any comment about Post #70 especially the part where most modern, wealthy countries have system similar to Obamacare? __________________ - Don't forget to buy Jiro's Special Edition Sunglasses for $19.95

03-25-2012, 07:58 PM	#88 (permalink)
Foxrac Need Stormtroopers? Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Zaphias Posts: 32,472	Yo txgolfer, do you want ALL government assistance to be abolished? __________________ In Moto We Trust

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